Maggie Shum

Comparative Politics

Maggie Shum is a Ph.D student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in comparative politics with a regional focus in Latin America. She is specifically interested in participatory policies, policy diffusion, political parties, the left and populism.

Her current research focuses on the incentives that drive politicians to implement and abandon participatory policies, in particular, the case of participatory budgeting (PB) in Brazil. She examines the relations between the diffusion of PB and the growth of the party organizational network using spatial and network analysis. In addition, her research will investigate the mechanisms behind the decline of PB in Brazil despite being praised as the "best practice" by the World Bank.

Prior to coming to Notre Dame, she earned my B.A. in Political Science and Communication at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2008. She then worked as an research intern at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) from 2008 to 2009. She continued my academic career at New York University (NYU) and obtained my M.A in Politics in 2011. Moreover, she interned at Freedom House and worked on several reports which include: Freedom in the World (Hong Kong, China and Tibet), Freedom in the Net (China), and the China Media Bulletin.